Saturday, July 24, 2010

Bubblicious

Yesterday started as a pretty quiet friday night in Chaos Central, as no new sites had spawned and the only signatures to be seen were the static wormholes. So we decided to pay a visit to the neighboring Class 1 system that was chock-full of combat sites and signatures, but it was also inhabited. the amount of sites tells us the people haven't logged in in a while though. But the system also contained another special feature. Bubbles. Lots of bubbles. We first laughed at what must be a severe case of paranoia but a quick survey of the system told us how crazy these guys are: about 98% of all the system's planets and moons had a Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I sitting on the warp-in point. Because no one seemed to be home and because we wanted to make a point that this was one of the most stupid ways you could spend 50 million ISK, we decided to go on a clean-up spree. So armed with two high-DPS PvP ships (in case someone wakes up) we started to methodically pop one bubble after another, until there were only two left, both located too near to the enemy POS for us to do anything about without risking our ships. Still, the owners should feel slightly less secure the next time they log on!

But as we were busy killing the bubbles, we did get to see some action, only not at all expected. Around the mid-point of our bubble killing spree we spotted a bunch of core scanner probes. Right away we thought "Awesome, the owners are waking up!", and we were ready to deal with some The PvP that might be thrown at us. This lasted a good 20 minutes and still, no sign of any defence force. I decided that when there would be less than 10 bubbles left I would pipe up in Local to tell the system owners about the error of their ways. This I did, but then the only answer that came was from a month-old noob and the more I was smacking, the more confused he was getting. After a bit of local convo, we found out that this guy had nothing to do with the system owners; he had become stuck in the system after entering it and having the wormhole collapse and not being able to find another hole because not only was the system too full of signatures, but his exploration skills were those of a month-old noob. In short, he was stranded. Oh, and he had also made the mistake of fitting too expensive a frigate; the words "10m ISK Heron" and "I put all my money into this ship" still give me goosebumps. At least he told me he had a battlecruiser waiting at home.

So after all this talk of W-space life and EVE lessons, I decided to be a good guy for once and not pod him straight home. I had him quit the fleet he was in (with his corp CEO, who was somewhere in New Eden trying to find him I guess) and had him join my fleet. I then had him warp to me at the C1/Chaos hole, and finally I warped the fleet to the Chaos/Hi-Sec hole, where Mr Daniel Opper was finally able to see civilization again in the form of Amarr space. I have no idea how far this is from his HQ but he was quite happy to be back in Empire space. So happy in fact that I received a notication saying he had added me to his contacts with excellent standing :)

In the words of animal rescuer Diego, rescue complete! I'm sure Daniel learned a thing or three about EVE in that short span of time. I don't know how active his current corporation is, but Daniel, if you feel like learning more about the ins and outs of W-space life, ChaosStorm will be opening up recruitment in the near future. Feel free to drop an application if you feel like it. We may not give free battlecruisers like your current corporation, but we have something just as good to offer: sleeper droppings !!!